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Who Wears the Pants in This Economy?

Sarah Beth Gettys, an executive at Russell Medical Center, and her husband, Charles, who once headed up sales for a division of a Fortune 500 company. “Probably no one has had their wife move up the ladder as far as I’ve moved down,” Charles said.Credit
Ann Weathersby for The New York Times

Patsy Prater’s office looks like something between an executive’s and a teacher’s, her large desk crowded with neat piles of grant applications and daily logs but also with dishes of candy and other freebies for the young and old who pass through. On the bulletin board behind her head are big, colorful signs designed to remind her public-housing clients of what they are eligible for: cellphones, computer classes or prescriptions that she makes sure they have even if she has to drive them to the pharmacy herself. At the front of her desk is a photo of her “grandbaby,” who lives in Madison, Ala., three hours away. She wishes she could be there, taking care of the infant now that her daughter is back at work. “I love this job,” she said. “I know it’s where I’m supposed to be. But I am not a women’s-rights-type person. My place is in the home, and I’m fine with that, so long as my husband is earning the bacon. ’Course, that hasn’t been happening so much lately.”

Patsy, who is 50 and works as a family-services director, and her husband, Reuben, 52, met on a blind date in 1979, and that very night he asked her to marry him — the first line of what he calls their “Cinderella” story. “What would you have done if I were a terrible kisser?” she likes to ask him, and he always answers, “I would have taught you how.” In 1981, Reuben was ready for a wedding, but Patsy was in her first year of college. Reuben told her he was madly in love, and if she did not quit school and marry him, he wouldn’t wait, “and I was stupid enough to believe him,” she says.

For the greater part of her marriage, the setup worked just fine for Patsy. Because Reuben stopped her from going to college, she could do what she wanted, which was to raise their three daughters without feeling guilty about not working. Reuben, who had a bachelor’s of science degree from Auburn University, was one of the longest-running service contractors for the Russell Corporation, the maker of athletic wear and the town’s largest employer. He ran a lucrative business cleaning the special pine floors at some of the mills and also had private clients in town. He made enough money for a very comfortable life: a house on a quiet, rural road here in Alexander City, Ala., four cars and multiple church missionary trips for his family to places like Africa and Brazil. Because he owned the business, Patsy could help him out with payroll and accounting on her own time and always be free to pick up the girls from school.

The mills supplied enough steady employment to keep most people in Alexander City out of poverty — until the mid-’90s less than a quarter of schoolchildren qualified for free or reduced-price lunch — and allow many families in town to live well. Here, a man with a degree in textiles or engineering could make $70,000 or even $100,000, enough to afford a house on the lake and a motorboat. He could drive a Lexus S.U.V. and take his family on a vacation to Disneyland and go to church, where, if he needed it, he would be prayed for by name.

In 1996, at the height of its success, Russell employed 7,000 of the town’s 15,000 residents. But the company soon faced competitors that undercut its prices. Like many textile companies in the area, Russell began shifting its plants to Mexico and Honduras, where clothes could be made cheaply. A decade later, only 3,200 people were still working for Russell in Alexander City, and the company was bought by Berkshire Hathaway. Now, at the facilities that remain open, that number is down to about 900, leaving many families in town in financial straits. The percentage of students at the high school receiving free lunches rose to 50 percent.

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Reuben and Patsy PraterCredit
Ann Weathersby for The New York Times

Reuben tried shifting his business focus to private homes, but “people don’t spend money on carpet and floor cleaning when they need it to buy groceries.” Within a few years the Praters went from comfortable to shaky. They relied on revolving accounts: refinancing the house to pay the credit-card bill, using the credit card to pay the electricity bill before the power went out. The phone frequently rang, and the person on the other end would ask, “Can you make that payment today?” The family stopped answering the phone.

Reuben said he realized that he would never have his old work life back and tried to remake himself. He found a job as director of mall operations in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and then one at a conference-call company in West Point, Ga., and next at a tire plant in Dothan, Ala. None lasted long. One “crazy thing or another,” as Patsy puts it, always doomed him: his long commutes, his health, family obligations, constant reminders that he was no longer his own boss. Over time, he became discouraged. He wasn’t “making the money I need to be making.”

As Reuben’s paychecks became less dependable, Patsy began “stressing” and wondered what she could do to help. Over the years she taught music at day-care centers, sometimes taking their youngest daughter, Jordan, with her. She had been “scared to death” to go back to college, but she studied at night with the aim of becoming a special-education teacher. Around 2006, a friend cornered her in a hallway at church and said she knew of a job that sounded perfect for her. Patsy was known as a helper by nature, driving seniors to church, assisting the youth choir, organizing mission trips. The friend recommended an opening at the city housing authority as a family self-sufficiency coordinator, which meant helping families in public housing become independent by connecting them with services.

Being a self-sufficiency coordinator involved a maternal touch, like encouraging single mothers to continue their education, obtain prenatal care and find reliable child care. Patsy had little experience in the work force and did not think of herself as a professional or a manager, but the friend told her she could possibly make as much as $20 an hour, which sounded better than the $5.50 she made at day care. It might not have been enough for Reuben, but to Patsy, who never had a steady paycheck, it sounded incredible. In three years she was promoted twice and is now director of family services. “I can only say it was God’s hand that did it,” she says. “I wasn’t searching for a job like that, not with my skills.”

In the last decade, men, especially working-class and middle-class men, have had very different experiences in this economy from the women around them. The manufacturing sector has lost almost six million jobs, nearly a third of its total work force, and has taken in few young workers. Across eastern Alabama, the old textile mills closed one after another, badly shaking up the economy. In Tallapoosa County, which contains Alexander City, the unemployment rate at the time I first visited last year was 13.3 percent — pretty standard for the region during the height of the recession. The housing bubble masked this new reality for a while, creating work in construction and related industries. But then that market crashed as well. Some jobs are trickling back now that Alabama is shifting its focus to “advanced manufacturing,” meaning jobs in industries like automobiles and aeronautics that require a higher degree of skills and training, says Joe Sumners, director of the Economic and Community Development Institute at Auburn University. But traditional manufacturing is unlikely to play the same role in the economy it once did.

While millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost over the last decade, jobs in health, education and services have been added in about the same numbers. The job categories projected to grow over the next decade include nursing, home health care and child care. Of the 15 categories projected to grow the fastest by 2016 — among them sales, teaching, accounting, custodial services and customer service — 12 are dominated by women. These are not necessarily the most desirable or highest-paying jobs. But they do provide a reliable source of employment and a ladder up to the middle class. It used to be that in working-class America, men earned significantly more than women. Now in that segment of the population, the gap between men and women is shrinking faster than in any other, according to June Carbone, an author of “Red Families v. Blue Families.”

In Alexander City, while the men were struggling, women either continued on with their work or found new jobs as teachers, secretaries or nurses or in the service industry. Like many states, Alabama has cut government services over the last few years, but the jobs that remain are relatively stable, Sumners said. More important than the particular jobs available, which are always in flux, is a person’s willingness to adapt to a changing economy. These days that usually requires going to college or getting some job retraining, which women are generally more willing to do. Two-thirds of the students at the local community college are women, which is fairly typical of the gender breakdown in community colleges throughout the country.

“An important long-term issue is that men are not doing as well as women in keeping up with the demands of the global economy,” says Michael Greenstone, an economist at M.I.T. and director of the Hamilton Project, which has done some of the most significant research on men and unemployment. “It’s a first-order mystery for social scientists, why women have more clearly heard the message that the economy has changed and men have such a hard time hearing it or responding.”

As the usual path to the middle class disappears, what’s emerging in its place is a nascent middle-class matriarchy, in which women like Patsy pay the mortgage and the cable bills while the men try to find their place.

The former Russell men are sometimes categorized by people in town as one of three types: the “transients,” who drive about an hour to Montgomery for work and never make it home for dinner; the “domestics,” who idle at the house during the day, looking for work; and the “gophers,” who drive their wives to and from work, spending the hours in between hunting or fishing.

In the years since his business declined, Reuben Prater seems to have played all three of these roles. Last fall, Reuben finally landed a good job in town as an information-technology specialist at a bank. But this year the bank was bought by another, and dozens of local employees, including Reuben, were laid off, and he was looking for a job again. Most mornings Reuben still wakes up at 5:30, goes to the gym and is back by 7:15 to have a quick breakfast with Patsy and their 18-year-old daughter, Jordan, who just graduated from high school. He sometimes receives texts from Patsy during the day, asking him to do one thing or another. Reuben does the laundry and runs the dishwasher and vacuums, but he doesn’t really make dinner. He goes to Walmart to buy groceries or pick up something for Jordan if he has to, but shopping is his least favorite chore. “I’m the househusband,” he says, half-joking. Sometimes he helps Patsy with work, doing research or helping set up an event for clients, just as she used to help him. Or he does volunteer work at church. In between these tasks, he trolls monster.com and other job sites, although some days he is so busy with the housework that he doesn’t get to the job search until 10 at night, when it’s peaceful in the house and no one is texting and asking him to run errands. In the last two months, he sent out 252 résumés to as far away as Toronto and Sacramento, but hasn’t heard anything. “My wheel’s just not rolling right now,” he says. “I got to find a new wheel or a new way to inflate the old one.”

One Wednesday morning this summer, after saying goodbye to Patsy, Reuben went to Burger King to have breakfast with his best friend, Tim, his “twin brother by a different mother” as he calls him. (They have the same birthday.) They usually meet every Saturday morning, but Tim, who had been working at Russell Medical Center, a large hospital, lost his job when his position in the marketing department was eliminated, and the previous day was his last at work. Tim’s wife is among the remaining employees at Russell, largely because she’s “willing to do anything — payroll, balance the books, do shipping,” he says. But Tim, like Reuben, has had trouble finding steady work and found himself idling at what Reuben called their “pity party.”

There were only men at the Burger King that morning: men in baseball hats talking. A candidate for mayor dropped by, as did a few men they knew from church.

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Rob and Connie Pridgen.Credit
Ann Weathersby for The New York Times

“Hey, Reuben, what you up to?”

“Not doing anything, just playing. If you find anything for me to do, call me.”

Reuben has a college degree and doesn’t seem especially preoccupied with machismo, so I asked him why, given how many different kinds of jobs he has held, he couldn’t train for one of the jobs that he knew was available: something related to schools, nursing or retail, for example. One reason was obvious — those jobs don’t pay as much as he was accustomed to making — but he said there was another. “We’re in the South,” he told me. “A man needs a strong, macho job. He’s not going to be a schoolteacher or a legal secretary or some beauty-shop queen. He’s got to be a man.” I asked several businesswomen in Alexander City if they would hire a man to be a secretary or a receptionist or a nurse, and many of them just laughed. It’s not hard to imagine a time when the prevailing dynamic in town might be female bosses shutting men out of the only open jobs.

Downtown Alexander City still sustains a wine store, a couple of restaurants, a quaint soda-fountain pharmacy, a real-estate office that looks like a SoHo loft and a trendy jeans-and-dress store that expanded this spring, among other businesses. But as with other once-prosperous towns, Alex City, as it is called, is straining to keep up appearances. A few storefronts are empty, and a few more look as if they’re barely hanging on. Cecil’s Public House, the one fancy restaurant, burned down in March and hasn’t been replaced, and a new gourmet bakery closed. People worry that one day the downtown might go the way of Goodwater, a city with a string of abandoned gray buildings 15 miles to the northwest.

The center of Alexander City is dominated by the steeple of the First Baptist Church, a thriving evangelical community, with packed pews every Wednesday and Sunday and events nearly every day of the week. There are several other churches in town, but First Baptist has always been the destination for much of the Alex City establishment, including some members of the Russell family, plant managers, doctors, lawyers and prominent couples like Charles and Sarah Beth Gettys. I met the couple, who are in their mid-50s, at a Wednesday-evening church supper last year — I noticed them because Sarah Beth was one of the few people at church wearing a suit. She is an executive at Russell Medical Center and, as I would learn over several visits, often the only person at Wednesday supper who so obviously raced over straight from the office and still had pressing business on her iPhone. Charles has more time on his hands but not necessarily fewer worries. “Probably no one has had their wife move up the ladder as far as I’ve moved down,” he told me the first night we talked, in his blunt and wry way. “For years I was the major breadwinner, and this has flipped the family around. Now she is the major breadwinner.”

Charles started out at Avondale Mills, in Pell City, Ala., hauling 80-pound rolls of cotton as a teenager; Avondale paid for him to attend nearby Auburn University to study textiles and engineering. He eventually moved to Russell, and for 23 years, Charles rose up the ranks at the plant, becoming a manager in the dyeing-and-finishing department and later head of national sales for the fabrics division. He sent three children to college and built a much-admired house on the lake. Even now, he carries the air of a comfortable patriarch; he is trim, with white hair and clear blue eyes. At church he looks as if he is about to go golfing, in khakis and a button-down shirt. He is usually self-deprecating, so he doesn’t quite put it this way, but it’s clear that he experienced his time at Russell as his glory days, when as the head of sales, he took trips to New York and stayed at the company’s Midtown apartment and saw Broadway plays and ate delicious rolls that don’t quite compare with the crumbly corn bread served at church suppers.

About 10 years ago Charles said he began to feel as if “I was on a horse that wasn’t going to make it. So do you just push the horse and hope for the best or get off?” Russell was no longer the place he had known. The company was hiring more women in managerial jobs, and while he had no problem with that in general, he said that some of these women hadn’t started out hauling cotton as he had and didn’t know the business from the ground up. But the company felt pressure to hire them, Charles told me, “to keep up with the times.” Russell was also shutting down plants, and Charles knew his position couldn’t last much longer. At one point he was offered a job running one of Russell’s local plants, but he declined. He was 45 at the time, young enough, he thought, to start over.

Unlike Patsy Prater, Sarah Beth has always worked. “If I had to sit at home, I would lose my mind,” she told me one morning as we talked in her office. Sarah Beth started as a nurse on the third shift at what was then just a small-town hospital. To the family, her salary was “fun money.” She would use it to shop for herself and, if the children complained about her working overtime, she would give them a choice: she could work less or pay for a family ski vacation.

As the hospital grew, Sarah Beth rose steadily up the ranks. In 2003, when Charles finally decided to quit, Sarah Beth had already been promoted into management, so he thought she could support them until he found his footing. Charles was always pretty handy, so he considered starting a construction company, even though he had never run a business. Working with trucks and piles of wood was a “humbling experience,” especially after having been a head of national sales. He said that he knew he would be competing with men who were in the business a long time or with younger men who once worked for him. When he had his broody moments, Sarah Beth said she would tell him: “Build a bridge and get over it. Don’t just sit and whine and carry on.” He finally started the business in 2004 and for a time it was “mildly successful,” but then the housing crisis hit in 2008 and construction work largely dried up.

Sarah Beth, meanwhile, was moving up the institutional ladder the way Charles once had, advancing from nurse manager of the medical-surgical unit to vice president in charge of patient services. She now spends her days in an office sandwiched between the chief executive and the chief financial officer of the hospital. She has a secretary and an endless series of meetings and conferences across the country. Her salary is now the money that the family relies on to pay the mortgage and the basic household expenses. One Wednesday evening I was tiptoeing my way toward asking Charles how he felt about his wife’s achievements — nervous that I might wound his pride — when he said: “I know what you’re asking. How does it feel to go from being the major breadwinner to the secondary breadwinner?”

He told me: “It used to bug me, but now I’ve gotten used to it.” What helped was realizing that he wasn’t alone in this upside down world he was living in. Shortly after he left Russell, Charles called the unemployment office in Montgomery to ask a question. The voice on the phone sounded familiar, and after a few minutes he realized he was talking to a woman who had worked with him at Russell. She transferred him to her supervisor, who turned out to be another woman who had worked with him. “You’re gonna laugh at this,” Charles told me, “but it was harder on the men than the women. It seems like their skills were more, what’s the word, transferable? I was born in the South, where the men take care of their women. Suddenly, it’s us who are relying on the women. Suddenly, we got the women in control.”

Often at the Wednesday-evening church suppers, the men would talk to me about their new situations, and after a few such conversations, I realized one reason the men were having such a hard time finding that new wheel. For the entirety of their adult lives, Russell, a 110-year-old company, played the role of dominant father: kind, generous and protective, but also overbearing, sometimes bullying and just capricious enough to keep them fighting for its affection. Even without a union, Russell made its men loyal for life by embracing the operational philosophy of the American manufacturing age: becoming a textile man was the same as becoming a man. Russell taught men how to work hard, how to support a family, how to live a good life, how to have the American dream their way.

When that structure disappeared, “there was no place for us to go,” Charles says. But more than that, there was no way for them to be. The town so revolved around Russell that when the company left, the men were virtually stripped of their identities. And there was barely anyplace left in America where being an expert on textiles could elevate you in that same way. When Charles first left Russell, all those words that used to mark his status — “dyeing,” “finishing,” “textile training” — suddenly seemed part of an ancient world, like speaking Shakespearean English, saying “thou” or “thee” out loud at the family dinner table, he said. And he thought, “Here I am, out in the world, trying to be a typewriter salesman.”

Many women worked at Russell — as seamstresses and occasionally as managers — but they were never allowed to be part of its ruling fraternity. For most women, Russell was never a way of life; it was just a job, and jobs are, as Charles says, transferable. Once it all started to fall apart, some women in town took out loans or used savings to go to school to become nurses, human-resources managers and legal secretaries. Many were willing to take low-paying jobs because they hadn’t spent their lives expecting to be the primary breadwinner. They did not find the available jobs humiliating or beneath them; they found it thrilling to be making steady money. After years of receiving promotions while their husbands looked for work, many women ended up in Patsy Prater’s or Sarah Beth Gettys’s position as the main source of support for their families. “Without Patsy’s job,” Reuben says, “we’d be sunk puppies.”

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Connie Pridgen’s daughter, Abby CulbersonCredit
Ann Weathersby for The New York Times

About two years ago, Gerald Hallmark, then the pastor of First Baptist, saw a man, who had been a plant manager, selling shirts at J. C. Penney. The man tried to avoid him, but Hallmark did his best to make him feel comfortable, by walking up and asking him how the new job was working out. After that, Hallmark had to make slight adjustments in what he had preached for nearly 20 years. Instead of reminding the men that the Bible instructs them to be the head of the household, he tells them, “Your manhood shows in your reaction to hard times.”

The changes in gender dynamics are forcing a rethinking of a basic philosophy in Alex City, and in the broader evangelical community. As R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., wrote in a blog a few years ago: “Christians committed to a biblical model of marriage and gender relations must look to this social revolution with a deeper level of concern.” What Christians should worry about, he argues, is “the long-term consequences of a new matriarchal world order.”

Like everyone of their generation I spoke to, Charles and Sarah Beth Gettys both insisted that Charles was still the “head of the household.” I often asked couples why the men got to retain the title if they weren’t fulfilling most of the attending duties. Sometimes they answered by redefining “head” as “spiritual head,” meaning biblically ordained as the leader. Often it came down to the man as the ultimate protector, the domestic superhero: if someone broke into the house, if the children were in trouble or out of control, if the roof caved in, if there was a tornado, if we needed him, he would rescue us. One man I met, Rob Pridgen, even discussed this in vaguely apocalyptic terms. If the country was self-destructing, and if we could no longer import food or rely on our government to protect us, then we would all remember what men were for.

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The women never credit their newfound dominance to feminism (“bra burning” is still the shorthand definition for that social movement among women I met of all ages). Instead they see the changes in women’s roles as “social evolution,” the polite, neutral term I heard from Barbara Young, the town’s first female mayor, elected in 2004. “It’s just the way things have moved along,” she said.

But you can sense among the women some impatience under the surface, some capitulation to the obviously shifting reality. “I’m very headstrong,” Patsy Prater says. “I probably don’t give in to him like I should” — which may have always been true as a private joke between them but is now uncomfortably magnified by the single paycheck. When I talked with Patsy in the family room at their house, she forbade Reuben to come downstairs, because he can sometimes dominate conversations. She quarantined him on the second floor, and I caught glimpses of him carrying a basket of laundry. Sarah Beth told me that she now asks her Sunday-school group of high-school girls to reflect on what being “submissive” means in today’s world. Theoretically, as head of the household, Charles could decide that he and Sarah Beth should move somewhere else, and Sarah Beth would follow. They both insist that’s how it would unfold. But given Sarah Beth’s success at her work, that scenario seems very theoretical.

Rob Pridgen’s wife, Connie, sometimes used the word “submissive” but usually put it in air quotes. Rob and Connie started dating in November 2009. A couple of months after that, Rob found out that his position at Russell as a network analyst would be phased out. They were in their 40s and each was divorced, and Rob said he knew right away that he wanted to marry Connie, but without a job, he could not bring himself to ask. Connie was in her second decade teaching English at Benjamin Russell High School, making a dependable salary, and Rob was struggling week to week, trying to start a network-consulting business. The situation was becoming awkward, they said, with neither of them knowing how to introduce the other to friends at church. Connie said she would sometimes just say, “This is my . . . Rob.”

When I first met them in the spring of last year, they had been married but were still working out their roles. Connie told me: “He is absolutely the guy who says: ‘I provide for my family. I’m the man of the house.’ ”

Rob said then: “You’re saying that as if I’m the dictator. It’s not the whole sit-in-the-kitchen-with-your-apron thing. But the way I was brought up, it’s a man’s responsibility to take care of his family.” Rob turned to me and added, “I don’t want to make the queen analogy, but my job is to make her the queen.”

“I pretty much internalize it. It’s like, if I can’t take care of her, then I’m not a man.”

At that point, Connie’s daughter from her first marriage, Abby, who was then 19, piped up with her own perspective on this Southern code of chivalry, which she said sounded like nonsense to her, given how the boys she knew actually behaved — hanging out in the parking lot, doing God knows what, or going home and playing video games instead of bothering to apply for college. Abby turned to Rob, who had just proclaimed his ideas about marriage, and said, “That’s so cute, it’s gross.”

One Saturday afternoon a few months later, the Pridgens gave me a tour of Lake Martin, which is a source of pride in Alex City. Rob was still trying to get his network-consulting business going. From Rob’s boat we saw million-dollar houses on the lake and a gourmet market nearby. Afterward we hung out in the living room of the much smaller house that Connie and Rob were then renting on the lake.

Abby had finished a year at a community college in Alex City and transferred to another community college outside Auburn, where she was now living with friends. She spent the day with Rob and Connie before she had to go to her evening shift at a local restaurant. Abby is striking, with long blond hair and full, frowny lips. She is reserved and prefers the company of intimates to the usual teenage crowds. As an English teacher, Connie likes to closely dissect all kinds of texts — Shakespeare’s plays, Bible verses, classic feminist essays. Each year Connie draws out fresh meaning from them, depending on what’s going on in her own life. That afternoon, while Rob sat nearby, Connie and Abby were mulling over a passage from Proverbs that is sometimes read at church for Mother’s Day and that had come up in a Bible-study group.

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The First Baptist Church in Alexander CityCredit
Ann Weathersby for The New York Times

The passage describes the “wife of noble character,” who works with the wool and flax, brings the food from afar, who “gets up while it is still dark,” buys a field, plants a vineyard, turns a profit, and “her lamp does not go out at night” because she’s still sewing clothes for the poor and generally being industrious while everyone else sleeps. Her husband, meanwhile, “is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.”

Traditionally the passage has been viewed as an elaboration of the proper roles of husband and wife. The husband sits in the dominant, protective role, watching his wife’s efforts on behalf of the family and taking pride. But in a town in which many men aren’t working steadily anymore, the words have taken on new meaning. There are people who have noticed that the passage never mentions what the husband is doing or what role he’s playing in providing food for his family, tilling the fields or turning a profit. What was dawning on Connie these last few months became obvious to Abby and Rob as she read the passage out loud. That noble wife is working from dawn to dusk. And the husband?

“Sounds like he’s sitting around with his buddies shooting the breeze, talking about the ballgame and eating potato chips,” Rob said.

Abby wasn’t surprised. Around Alex City, she said it seemed that it was the girls who were full of energy and eager to see the world. Her own brother, Alex, who was 17, seemed to want to stay in town forever and raise his family here. But Abby was enrolled in Southern Union State Community College, attending on a show-choir scholarship. Her plan was to go there for a year, as many girls in Alex City do, to save money, and then head to Auburn University.

Ambitious teenagers in the area, who want a life that is not defined by hot, noisy factories, often think the first stop is Auburn, about a 45-minute drive southeast on U.S. 280. This is the way it has always been, even before Russell closed, because in the limited geography of a teenager’s mind, Auburn is the closest place with a multiplex and a mall, not to mention a university with an excellent football team.

Across eastern Alabama, Auburn is considered the one city that got it right, a lucky college town that avoided the pitfalls of the rest of the region, a place that took advantage of its strengths to survive in the modern economy. Surrounding counties had unemployment rates in the double digits during the recession, and one had gone as high as 19.3 percent. Lee County, which contains Auburn and its sister city, Opelika, had spells of high unemployment but weathered the recession and now has an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent, close to the national average. Auburn University has anchored the economy for more than 150 years. City officials scrupulously avoided becoming dependent on a single large manufacturer like Russell. Instead, the city courted many smaller manufacturing companies. Auburn has become a reflection of the modern, feminized economy: a combination of university, service and government jobs.

Auburn has enough stately mansions lining the main streets to signal prosperity and enough untamed wildness — a herd of cattle graze near the latest research park — not to tip over into suburbia. In 2009, the town was on U.S. News & World Report’s list of Top 10 best places in the United States to live.

Auburn is also an especially good place for young women. James Chung, a market researcher for Reach Advisors, analyzed census data showing that in most of the United States, young, single, childless women in their 20s working full time have a higher median income than equivalent young men. A handful of regions in the Southeast stand out as having a particularly big disparity, including Auburn, where the median income of these women is estimated at 129 percent of the median income of similar men.

In July, when I visited Connie and Rob again, Abby was home for the summer. She had been accepted to Auburn and was making plans to transfer to her new school. She was dressed in a maxiskirt and a tube top and was sunk down in a chair, trying to wake herself up so she wouldn’t be late for her shift at an Auburn restaurant. Compared with her high-school friends, the Auburn kids are “more focused,” she told me. “They are much more goal-­oriented, more careful.”

Abby was interested in being an actress or singer, she said. We watched a DVD of her performing an impressive version of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” at the community college. She had been dating a guy who moved to New York to look for acting jobs and was thinking about moving there herself someday soon. Since going to college, Abby was starting to come up with her own ideas about courtship. “Personally I don’t like a guy paying for everything,” she said. “I’ll buy the popcorn, you pay for the movies.” Her future excluded the conventional aspiration of the Southern belle: “I’ve heard other girls say, ‘I want to stay home,’ and I’m thinking, Why? What would you do? Vacuum four times a day?”

Abby is not the only one questioning the old rules. At a Sunday Bible-study group I attended for teenage girls, the mother who was teaching had the girls hold hands, march in a circle and say: “My husband will treat me like the princess that I am. He will be the head of my household.” But the girls’ own ambitions seemed at odds with that vision. One girl earlier confessed that her biggest earthly temptation during her college years was likely to be “pursuing too many higher degrees.” Another was known to her friends in the group as the “future president.” I got the sense that relying on a man was not what they considered their best option.

Connie said she really wants Abby to settle down and find a nice man — not necessarily to completely take care of her but to keep her safe in a strange city. She said she hoped that Abby’s desire to go to New York was just a phase, that maybe she would end up in Atlanta, working at a theater and married with children. But there was her daughter on TV, singing back an urgent, defiant answer: “Don’t tell me not to fly./I’ve simply got to./If someone takes a spill/it’s me and not you./Who told you you’re allowed to rain on my parade?”

A few months ago Rob Pridgen finally found a full-time job as the information-technology director for Alex City. Still, the family decided that it couldn’t afford to send Abby to Auburn after all, and instead she is attending the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Reuben Prater continues to send out about 10 résumés a night. Charles Gettys started a new company, with a friend, that builds docks and customizes structures for jet skis or boats for vacationers at the lake. He has become part of what economists call the “artisan economy,” an option for men who have been abandoned by the manufacturing sector. They use their skills and knowledge of the local landscape and materials to do work that can’t be easily ordered from China or executed by machine. Charles says he’s doing O.K. In a good year he now makes a quarter of what he once did, and Sarah Beth makes significantly more than he did in his best days at Russell.

As the economy fails to fully recover, it’s unclear what will happen to traditionally male or female jobs generally. Some sectors seem undeniably strong: health care, for example, and technology, although there aren’t many tech jobs in places like Alexander City. Manufacturing survives mainly in new and highly specialized forms. Local government jobs, especially ones in low-tax states like Alabama, have gone through severe cuts in the last decade and are unlikely to be cut much further. Jobs like Patsy’s, which rely on federal financing, could be vulnerable given the current political fixation on budget cuts. An important quality for anyone trying to survive in this economy is one that Reuben, in his own limited way, is trying to embody — the one that seems to come more easily to his wife — the capacity to “remake myself again, find my new niche.”

In the meantime, new legends are starting to take hold in Alex City. One morning when I was talking to Reuben and his friend Tim, they were overtaken by a wave of nostalgia. They traded stories of the legendary Russell patriarchs: the engineer so brilliant that people followed him around at trade shows; the chief executive held in such awe that the “waves parted” when he walked into a room. But those were the “bygone days,” they agreed. Now, there is a fresh cast of characters who can draw an admiring crowd. These local luminaries are no longer the patriarchs but the wives. When they go to dinner, Reuben says, so many people come up to Patsy to thank her or praise her for things she has done for them that the Praters sometimes have to move to a back table for privacy. “I’ve looked at her so many times and thought, She’s just this amazing woman,” Reuben says. “She’s a miracle within herself.”

Correction: September 16, 2012

An article on Sept. 2 about the changing roles of men and women in the economy, as experienced by a number of families in Alexander City, Ala., misstated the time it takes to drive from Alexander City to Montgomery, Ala., where some people have found work. It is about an hour, not three hours. And a contributors’ note on the contents page for the author of the article, Hanna Rosin, gave an outdated name for a publication where she is a senior editor. It is The Atlantic, not The Atlantic Monthly. (She is also with Slate.)